IV.

I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early
part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the
invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken
intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did
little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now
wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste
is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am
not saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such a
very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston
and Harper's in New York were the magazines that paid, though the
Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press
printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine,
though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much
that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to
the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before.
After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note
saying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because they
saw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of the
story had appeared. Then I remembered that, years before, I had sent
this chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and
afterwards had continued the story from it. I had never heard of its
acceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my second
visit to New York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new editor,
of those that the magazine was always having in the days of its failing